Alaska Employment Law

A few months ago I read Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters, a memoir about her brief love affair with Jack Kerouac circa 1957, just before he became a celebrity following the publication of his finest book, On the Road.  As the story goes, Johnson, then Joyce Glassman, was a young woman from a “nice” family, working for a publishing house in Manhattan, when she was introduced to Kerouac (on a blind date) by their common friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg.  Johnson eventually tires of Kerouac because of his undependability and alcoholism.  It’s a well written book; Johnson’s memoir has style and charm, and the book is full of period atmosphere.

As time has marched on, however, many of the other women of the Beat Generation have written their books, too, and I recently read (in one day) Helen Weaver’s The Awakener, just published, which is about, well… a young woman from a “nice” family, working for a publishing house in Manhattan and living with a roommate.  One day in 1956 or 1957 or so, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and two of their friends, just back from a road trip, ring the bell to Helen’s Greenwich Village apartment and are invited up to take a shower and catch up on some sleep.  Jack and Helen are attracted to each other, and as the story evolves, they fall in love.  Weaver eventually tires of Kerouac because of his undependability and alcoholism, and she kicks him out of the apartment.  Shortly thereafter she discovers that he has moved in with… Joyce Glassman.

Hearing this story from Johnson/Glassman was romantic.  Learning that it was just Kerouac’s form of serial monogamy with star struck women a dozen years his junior makes us wonder about his capacity for love and drink.

I am a huge fan of Kerouac’s writing, but he was clearly a man not well suited to his fame.  Worse, his fans and readers somehow expected him to be like the famous character Dean Moriarty (who was really Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady) from On the Road, a lovely crazy irresponsible lunatic full of madness for life and love – in short, they wanted Jack to be the King of the Beats.  But Kerouac was an unhappy man, a drinker, killed by booze at age 47, who repudiated the beatniks and the hippies and all the other so-called “free thinkers and communists” who supposedly took their cue from him, a man who died living with his mother, whom he could never escape.  For all that, he was a spectacular poet and novelist whose work is more appreciated now than ever before.

Weaver is less of a stylist than Johnson, but ultimately she has more to say.  After her affair with Kerouac she befriends and meets Lenny Bruce, perhaps the first great modern comedian (well, some might say Lord Buckley was, but I think Bruce is the better candidate), and they have an even briefer affair.  But Weaver goes on, lives an independent life, makes a living in literary circles as a superb translator of French literature, and takes up astrology.  She remained friends with Allen Ginsberg and the other Beat writers in her circle for decades, and she continues to work today.  The Awakener is in many ways a more insightful book than Minor Characters.  Both are recommended – as is On the Road, my favorite book of all time.